by D. Eric Bookhardt, Gambit

Over the years, Josephine Sacabo’s mysterious, dreamy and archaic looking photographs have appeared in galleries like fragments of dreams or artifacts brought back by time travelers to the 19th century of the French Symbolists and magic realists. It is hard to believe they are products of our time, and the same might be said of Ersy’s dreamily Gothic and surreal bronze, silver and wood sculptures, only her work harks to no specific period or place but to an alien yet familiar realm of the imagination, a place of beautiful if twisted mysteries.

Both artists are longtime friends, but the effect of several decades of their work seen in such close proximity is startling if not magical. Ersy’s sculpture may come as a revelation because pieces that resembled impressive curiosities in her infrequent and more modest earlier exhibitions are now revealed to be integral parts of an intricately elaborated parallel universe. Comprised of strange mice and skeletal birds among other fantastical creatures, all are either tangled up in strange mechanisms or else arrayed in carnivalesque processions like her miniature Hommage to the Society of Ste. Anne (pictured) and in otherworldly settings with Max Ernst, Pauline Reage and Brothers Grimm overtones evoked by the clever use of abstract details. And where Sacabo is overtly romantic, Ersy is as taut and fraught as a Hitchcock thriller. Both are meticulously prolific — Sacabo (disclosure: the wife of Gambit theater writer Dalt Wonk) has an impressive parallel exhibition of her most recent work at A Gallery for Fine Photography — and the detailed thoroughness of both artists’ vision is staggering. Some three years in the making, this exhibition, along with the George Dureau expo upstairs, offers new evidence of the Ogden Museum’s potential as a showcase for providing striking new insights that would have been unlikely anywhere else, here or abroad.

Through Jan. 8
Ersy: Architect of Dreams: Retrospective exhibition of sculpture by Ersy
Oyeme Con Los Ojos: Retrospective exhibition of photographs by Josephine Sacabo
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp St., 539-9600; www.ogdenmuseum.org